Google Translate

Google Translate is a service provided by Google Inc. to translate a section of text, or a webpage, into another language, with limits to the number of paragraphs, or range of technical terms, translated. For some languages, users are asked for alternate translations, such as for technical terms, to be included for future updates to the translation process.

Unlike other translation services such as Babel Fish, AOL, and Yahoo which use SYSTRAN, Google uses its own translation software.

Functions

The service also includes translation of an entire Web page. The translation is limited in number of paragraphs per webpage (such as indicated by break-tags <br>); however, if text on a webpage is separated by horizontal blank-line images (auto-wrapped without using any <br>), a long webpage can be translated containing several thousand words.

Google Translate, like other automatic translation tools, has its limitations. While it can help the reader to understand the general content of a foreign language text, it does not deliver accurate translations and does not produce publication-standard content, for example it often translates words out of context and is deliberately not applying any grammatical rules, since its algorithms are based on statistical analysis rather than traditional rule-based analysis.

Approach

Google translate is based on an approach called statistical machine translation, and more specifically, on research by Franz-Josef Och who won the DARPA contest for speed machine translation in 2003. Och is now the head of Google's machine translation department.

According to Och, a solid base for developing a usable statistical machine translation system for a new pair of languages from scratch, would consist in having a bilingual text corpus (or parallel collection) of more than a million words and two monolingual corpora of each more than a billion words. Statistical models from this data are then used to translate between those languages.

To acquire this huge amount of linguistic data, Google used United Nations documents. The same document is normally available in all six official UN languages, thus Google now has a 7-language corpus of 20 billion words' worth of human translations.

The availability of Arabic and Chinese as official UN languages is probably one of the reasons why Google Translate initially focused on the development of translation between English and those languages, and not, for example, Japanese and German, which are not official languages at the UN.

Google representatives have been very active at domestic conferences in Japan in the field asking researchers to provide them with bilingual corpora.

Options

(by chronological order)

Beginning

English to Arabic
English to French
English to German
English to Spanish
French to English
German to English
Spanish to English
Arabic to English

2nd stage

English to Portuguese
Portuguese to English

3rd stage

English to Italian
Italian to English

4th stage

English to Chinese (Simplified) BETA
English to Japanese BETA
English to Korean BETA
Chinese (Simplified) to English BETA
Japanese to English BETA
Korean to English BETA

5th stage (launched December, 2006)

English to Russian BETA
Russian to English BETA

6th stage (launched April, 2006)

English to Arabic BETA
Arabic to English BETA

7th stage (launched February, 2007)

English to Chinese (Traditional) BETA
Chinese (Traditional) to English BETA
Chinese (Simplified to Traditional) BETA
Chinese (Traditional to Simplified) BETA

8th stage (launched October, 2007)

all 25 language pairs use Google's machine translation system

9th stage

English to Hindi BETA
Hindi to English BETA

10th stage (as of this stage, translation can be done between any two languages) (launched May, 2008)

Bulgarian
Croatian
Czech
Danish
Finnish
Hindi
Norwegian
Polish
Romanian
Swedish

11th stage (launched September 25, 2008)

Catalan
Filipino
Hebrew
Indonesian
Latvian
Lithuanian
Serbian
Slovak
Slovenian
Ukrainian
Vietnamese

Criticism

Due to the possibility of users suggesting "better translations" of given texts, there have also been manipulations and pranks found in the tool.

The Slovenian-English original beta version contained several pranks. For instance, Google Translate translated "Janša je lep" ("Janša is beautiful") into "Sanader is beautiful", "Slovenska obala" ("Slovenian coast") into "Croatian coast", "Ljubljana" into "rape", "Kranj" into "Miami" and "Koper" into "Chicago".